The Francis F. Palmer House is the centerpiece of a complex of residential buildings located at 67, 69, and 75 East 93rd Street in New York City, known collectively as the George F. Baker Jr. Houses. They were completed during the years 1918-1931 to the designs of the architecture firm Delano & Aldrich. In 1982, the entire ensemble was added as a group to the National Register of Historic Places. History (1918-1940) Initial construction In early 1916, stockbroker Francis Fletcher Palmer (1874-1923) bought a lot in Manhattan on the northwest corner of 93rd and Park Avenue, which as recently as 1913 had been occupied by a Roman Catholic school for girls, run by the sisters of the Ursuline order. To facilitate construction of a new house, Palmer (or the previous owner of the property) demolished the two school buildings on the site. Palmer engaged the architects Delano & Aldrich, who designed a neoclassical house, with a handsome white-marble balustrade separating a three-story brick facade from a two-story slate mansard roof. The house occupied the eastern part of the lot, while the western part was dedicated to an enclosed garden with a central, circular fountain. At the time of the 1920 US census, Palmer was living in his new house with his wife, seven children, and ten servants. He died of pneumonia in April 1923, and in May 1926, his heirs sold the house to financier George Fisher Baker, Jr. (1878-1937). Brevoort mansion Earlier, in July 1919, Baker and his wife, Edith Kane Baker (1884-1977), bought the Henry Brevoort Mansion (Edith Baker was Brevoort's great-granddaughter), built in 1834 on lower Fifth Avenue to the designs of architects Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis. The couple intended to renovate the house for their own use but sold it in 1925. Before they did, they removed two mantels and an ornamental plaster frieze, all of which they installed in their new living room on 93rd Street. First expansion Palmer's house sat on a lot with sixty-four feet of frontage on Park Avenue and one hundred feet of frontage along East 93rd Street. By purchasing the adjacent lots to the north (1190 Park Avenue) and west (69-71 East 93rd Street), George Baker increased his frontage on both the street and the avenue, allowing him to expand both the house and the garden. At 1190 Park Avenue, he demolished a thirty-seven-foot wide, five-story residential building